"The
role played by the Egyptian president, whose membership with the Muslim
Brotherhood has facilitated relations with Hamas. But Morsi's
military alliance with the United States has helped substantiate Obama's bid for
newly-rejuvenated relations with the Islamic world, which were announced in his
famous 2009 Cairo speech."

President Mohammed Morsi: His apparent pragmatism in dealing woth the Gaza crisis has quieted his Western critics, but his assertion of sweeping powers which put him beyond the reach of the law, similar to those asserted by Rome's ancient dictators, has enraged the Egyptian opposition.

At last there is some good news coming from Gaza. After
eight days of open conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group
Hamas, and with more than 150 Palestinians and five Israelis dead, both sides
agreed to a truce on Wednesday. The agreement stipulates that Israel stop its targeted
air attacks on Gaza, and the Palestinians will abandon hostilities and stop
firing rockets into Tel Aviv. Moreover, both sides have agreed to undertake
further negotiations to find a more durable peace.

This initial agreement, obtained through the mediation of
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and the U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is fragile. As in the case of the patient
who underwent delicate surgery, any complications in the immediate
postoperative period - in this case any violations of the ceasefire, can have
lethal consequences.

The outbreak of violence triggered by the assassination of Hamas
military commander Ahmed Jabari in an Israeli
military operation carried out in Nov. 14 in central Gaza has had devastating
effects. Despite the precision of Israeli attacks, half the Palestinian
fatalities were civilians, including 38 children. Israel has destroyed nests of
rocket launchers and administrative facilities in Gaza City, where grisly
scenes of corpses of alleged Israeli spies were dragged through the streets by
motorcycles driven by Islamist militants. Despite a missile shield, some of Hamas'
Iranian-made rockets fired from Gaza reached Tel-Aviv, where there was a bomb
attack on a bus ...

Posted by Worldmeets.US

News of ceasefire is welcome, particularly given its
immediate results. But there are other reasons. For example, the role played by
the Egyptian president, whose membership with the Muslim Brotherhood has
facilitated relations with Hamas. But Morsi's
military alliance with the United States has helped substantiate Obama's bid for
newly-rejuvenated relations with the Islamic world, which were announced in his
famous 2009 Cairo speech. Thus, both the work of Mohamed Morsi,
a new benchmark for diplomacy in the region, and Hillary Clinton, who left her
Asian tour with Obama to fly to the Middle East, indicates that multilateral
relations are perhaps going more smoothly today than when Bush Jr. presided
over the U.S. and Hosni Mubarak over Egypt.

The agreement we celebrate today will eventually be revealed
as a parenthesis or as the cornerstone of something more solid. For this to
happen, more security and mobility must be provided Israelis and Palestinians,
and we have to move toward ending the blockade Gaza has suffered under for the
past five years. If anything has underscored the crisis, it is the volatility of
the area, the vicious recurrence of mutual bombardment, and its explosive
potential. It is a potential that has been manifesting itself for sixty years and
that Iran's nuclear ambitions, the war in Syria and its manifestations in Lebanon
only render more significant.

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